


once I was made of bone / now water, now nothing

by RayOfLight2513



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Episode 195 "Adrift", F/F, Female Character of Color, LGBTQ Female Character of Color, and fandom gave me another, contains spoilers up to episode 198, look jonny sims gave me one brown character, this plot is basically 'basira sits on an island and thinks about daisy', write an entire fic about them being brown, you can't expect me not to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 14:26:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30090474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RayOfLight2513/pseuds/RayOfLight2513
Summary: Basira had been kind of hoping she’d have seen Daisy by now. Isn’t that how it works, in the stories? The ghosts of those you’ve killed stepping on your footprints. The dead wife whispering in your ear.But Basira knows many things, and one of them is herself. Even if there had been the option of Daisy’s ghost, there is no version of her who would indulge it. Her mind - this dispassionate, unwieldy thing - has always been her own worst enemy.
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	once I was made of bone / now water, now nothing

Basira had been kind of hoping she’d have seen Daisy by now. Isn’t that how it works, in the stories? The ghosts of those you’ve killed stepping on your footprints. The dead wife whispering in your ear.

Not that she’d ever married Daisy. Towards the end, they hadn’t even been lovers. Basira can’t decide if she regrets that or not - she’d kept Daisy in her cot when she came back from the Buried, but never kissed her again. Maybe it would have helped her. Maybe it would have made the betrayal sting more.

Still - dream logic. The same dream logic that had killed Jonathan Sims’ friend could have kept Basira Hussain haunted. It would probably even be torture: Basira’s steel-trap mind crumbling, and in such a pleasant way she wouldn’t want to fight it. 

But Basira knows many things, and one of them is herself. Even if there had been the option of Daisy’s ghost, there is no version of her who would indulge it. Her mind - this dispassionate, unwieldy thing - has always been her own worst enemy. 

Basira had come to a lake - in a town where there had never been a lake before - and seen it spanned by a rickety little bridge, wood rotting, rails missing. The water below was black. Not blue ranging to black, but dark as Ny-Alesund had been. She’d tested the bridge with her foot, and heard the long painful _creeeaaak_. She’d looked up to face the Panopticon - it stared at everything, all the time, but it was always always staring at her. 

“Don’t even fucking think it,” she’d told the great eye. And she’d put her weight down onto the first step, and then the second. No slow testing of the next plank - she knew enough to know that wouldn’t do anything if that plank decided to be the one to fall. But Basira reasoned her way out of the Unknowing through sheer force of will. Compared to that, the physics of a creaking bridge over black water is nothing.

Still, when she’d seen the bridge crumbling behind her, she’d run like a goddamn video game character. That Subway Surfer Tim had played obsessively - an improbable sprint as the wood beneath her feet crumbled into the lake. 

She’d made it, if only barely, huffing and sweating as she dove to the gravel beach of a small island in the middle of the lake. She’d scraped up her palms and her knees on the gravel, but it got worse. She was stuck, in a lake that went on forever in all directions, on a grey island ten paces in diameter, with Elias (although she knows his secret, she still calls him Elias in her head) watching her from the sky and from London and not even a tree’s shade to duck behind.

Her hijab had come askew as she ran. She’d kept her hair buzzed before the world had gone to hell, but now it sticks out from all angles, little coiled curls peeking out from beneath the one black hijab she has. She’d turned her back on Elias - knowing that the eyes in the sky could still see her - and, skin crawling, undid the pins on her hijab so she could put them back in place. 

Basira has been luckier than most of the people in this new world. Her pain is fleeting, her fear uncultivated. But the humiliation of being seen, and being seen by Elias - it’s brutal. She fixed her hijab and he saw her. She passed through a Dark domain and fear-sweat through her shirt and he saw her. She cried over Daisy’s body and he saw her. She knows it’s personal. Elias loves Jon, never saw Tim and Melanie as anything more than an annoyance, but she’d seen the way Elias looked at her. He’d tried to play it cool, but Elias Bouchard hates her. He hates her, and this is his little revenge. 

Brought low by a man half her size. Basira’s pride, so large she could use it as a boat to cross this damn lake, still stings at that. The eighteen-year-old idealistic Basira that she’s tried her best to kill decides it makes a thematically resonant end to the story. 

Daisy is dead and gone, and Basira is stuck with herself. 

Basira was raised on Bollywood movies. Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor and Rekha. Cheesy action sequences and long-lost siblings and love at first sight. Her Somali mother left her country of birth as a teenager and didn’t look back, but her Pakistani father never stopped longing for home, and it showed. He took Basira and her little brother Salman to the Hindi movie theatre every Saturday. She’d sat and watched Madhuri dance and Lata sing, and for three and a half hours nothing else mattered.

She’d believed them, too, which is worse. She’d joined the police because she had ideas of helping people, of reforming the system from the inside, thinking that a system like that could be reformed by a girl like her. She’d watched Salman become an engineer, marry his Hindu girlfriend, win over his in-laws, and settle into domestic bliss with three daughters, each more trouble than the last, and assumed she’d get that as well. Even after she’d accepted in high school she was gay, she’d come out to her parents, dealt with the fallout as they processed, and gotten them on her side. She’d waited for her own wife to come, certain she was coming.

And she’d met Daisy, and Basira had fallen helplessly into love, and it had been horrible. She’d known what Daisy was, on some level, even if she refused to admit it to herself. She’d told her mother she wasn’t dating and didn’t take Daisy home. She doesn’t regret that. If Daisy had killed her, Basira had known what she was getting into. If Daisy had killed Melanie or Martin or Jon, it would have been bad, but Basira would have been fine. But her family? If Daisy had known them, Daisy could have hurt them to hurt Basira, and Basira would have broken.

She hasn’t seen her family in a year. Not since she got hired at the Institute. She’d hoped it would protect them. But she’d failed, at her quest to stop the world’s ending. She’d failed.

She keeps thinking about where they’d be. Her father in the Lonely. Her mother in the Buried. Salman in the Spiral. Her sister-in-law Pooja in the Desolation, maybe, or the Corruption. She doesn’t know about her three nieces, each more trouble than the last. Basira knows what they’re afraid of (she’d checked under beds and in closets for monsters for them when she used to babysit, listened to their elaborate descriptions of what the monsters looked like). But she hasn’t seen any children since the Watcher’s Crown. 

As Basira had passed from Domain to Domain, she’d looked for them. Knowing what she’d subjected them to couldn’t be nearly as bad as not knowing. Although perhaps having them in front of her and not being able to save them would have been worse. At least now she has purpose, without anything to confuse it. Kill Elias, and she can save them. Kill Elias because he hurt her family, and he saw her without her hijab, and because he made her shoot the love of her life and watched her weep over the body.

Basira looks up at the Panopticon, then around at the water. Swimming would be unimaginably stupid, but it’s not like anyone is going to come to save her. And if she doesn’t get to London, Jon and Martin will try to reverse the apocalypse without her, and she has no faith whatsoever in their abilities. 

Although when they tried to stop the apocalypse with her, she hadn’t contributed much at all. Basira’s pride has deflated considerably after the Watcher’s Crown, but it rears its head at odd moments.

The water is supernaturally black: she can’t even see the slope of the island’s gravel past the tideline. She plunges her hand in, to test. The water is so cold it goes numb immediately, and she lets out a shocked cry of pain and pulls her hand out. She’d answered the question about the sandbar, too - there is none. Basira is on top of a pillar, with a sheer drop ten paces away on every side. 

No swimming, then. 

So she sits down on the beach until she can think of something better to do. She prays when she gets tired of coming up with and dismissing plans - aiming a little bit further south than Mecca actually is, but she’d rip out her own fingernails before she’d bow in the direction of London. She thinks about Daisy, as habitual as the way Tim would rub his brother’s old cross, pushing the pads of his fingers into the sharp metal edges. Half comfort, half punishment. 

After her sixth prayer (the longest Basira’s stayed in one place since before the Watcher’s Crown) she sees it. Something in the water. The curve of a spine-fin, breaching the surface and continuing for ages. After Basira has sat, horrified, trying to draw in breath for several seconds, she starts to count. She gets to eighty-three before the tail of the monster finally appears. 

When the Tube goes through a station - at a slower speed than that! - it takes about twenty seconds. Whatever’s out there is four times longer than a train. If it turned to Basira, on her tiny fragile island, she wouldn’t have a chance. And what a way to go: powerless, no way to fight back, forced to bow her head and take it, the lake on all sides to provide the best view for Elias. This was a trap, designed just for her. And she fell right into it. 

She sucks in a long gasp of air, trying not to cry in fear, and turns it into anger instead. A trick she learned from Melanie, so long ago. “Fuck you,” she tells Elias. “Fuck you, you piece of shit _harami sala_ dickhead.” She works her way through all the insults she knows - and, as she speaks English and Arabic fluently, and Urdu, Hindi, and Somali conversationally, she knows quite a few. 

She repeats that litany of curses until her heart stops pounding. Even after, she doesn’t stop looking for the next time that monster comes up from the surface. Basira won’t be able to prevent her death, but she can at least see it coming.

Digging Daisy’s grave had taken hours. First she’d tried to clean the body, as best she could. She’d hoped in death, Daisy would look less monstrous. Like in a movie, when the curse was broken, and the person underneath the monster looks very fragile and very human. But Daisy didn’t change once her heart stopped. Still blood-streaked, still long-toothed, still twisted into something meant to run on all fours. Basira had taken off an under-shirt, wet it, and used it to clean the blood from her mouth. She’d tried to straighten Daisy’s fingers out of the claw-shape they’d taken, but had given up when she’d become afraid she would snap them. Then she’d held Daisy’s head in her lap and wept for more than an hour.

She stopped when the tingling on the back of her neck had grown unbearable. Basira had raised her head and turned to see the Panopticon focused so powerfully on her and her misery there was actually light shining onto her. Elias had been watching her the entire time she’d mourned. 

She didn’t scream, or cry, or swear. Just got up from under Daisy, put her head gently in the dirt, and went looking for a piece of scrap metal to use as a shovel. Then she’d begun the hours-long process of digging a grave so deep when she was standing inside it went up to her shoulders. Daisy would have hated being put back in the dirt, but Basira refused to burn her in the incinerators all around them. And she was a little afraid, if she left Daisy out, Daisy would somehow come back to life. Basira had killed her once. She didn’t think she could do it again. Even if she could (Basira can do so many more hard things than she wishes she could), she desperately didn’t want to.

She’d climbed out of the grave, picked Daisy up with a bit of effort (while Basira was bigger, Daisy was taller, and the Hunt had grown Daisy even more so), and placed her love into the dirt. She’d kissed her forehead, and faltered, trying to think of what to say. “Goodbye,” she’d said finally. “I love you.”

It was the second time she’d ever told Daisy that. The first time had been nearly three years previously, before either of them had gotten mixed up in the Magnus Archives. 

She’d climbed ungracefully out of the grave and filled it in, putting the dirt right on Daisy’s chest and face, then faltered again afterwards. There were prayers specifically for funerals, she knew. Daisy wasn’t Muslim, of course, but she’d never begrudged Basira the comfort her religion brought her, and Daisy wouldn’t have minded it now. But Basira’s grandparents had all died when she was young, and her family is alone in London, the rest of her relatives ‘back home’ in places Basira has only seen once or twice. There are prayers for the dead, but Basira didn’t know any of them, and so Daisy wouldn’t get any. 

The tears had come again, at that, sliding passively down her cheeks before she’d scrubbed them away. She’d crouched down, pressed her palm to the loose mound of grave-dirt until it formed a handprint, then walked away like every step hurt. 

She’d meant, vaguely, to bury the man Daisy had killed - Derek, Jon had said his name was - but she doesn’t have the energy for it now. Besides, maybe he’d come back to life. She knows as soon as she thinks it it’s a rationalization, but she walks away from the mess of his body anyways.

Twenty prayers after she’d first landed on the island, and three appearances of the creature in the water, Jon comes in a rowboat. If there was anyone who could have found her, it would have been him, and she can’t stop the smile that spreads when she sees him. 

Basira doesn’t want to like Jon. Most of the time she can remember all the shit he’s done. But he’s her type of person: the sense of humour, the drive for knowledge that got them both into so much trouble, the care for Daisy. Even the camaraderie of being two brown Muslims in white-dominated fields in a white-dominated city. Not liking Jon is as much of a choice as not kissing Daisy. Just like with Daisy, she hasn’t decided if it’s a good one or not. 

He isn’t just here to rescue her, of course: Martin has been taken to the house on Hill Top Road. And Melanie and Georgie lead a cult now. She can just picture Melanie saying that thing she used to say all the time. _Adult life is already so goddamn weird, this might as well happen._

Basira rows the boat over the lake while Jon hunches into himself and knots his fingers together. She’s never rowed a boat before, but it’s a lot less effort than it looked when Jon did it. To be fair to Jon, she’s a lot bigger than he is: Basira’s mother had been round and her father had been stocky, and Basira is somehow both at once. Jon, meanwhile, especially after his coma, reminds Basira of a house of cards. His bones all lean against each other. One touch could knock them down.

“What happened to you since we last saw each other?” Jon asks. “Daisy - did you…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she snaps. He nods and falls silent again.

He looks the same as last time, though his hair is a bit longer. After the Watcher’s Crown, Jon and Martin had both buzzed their hair down nearly to stubble. Basira had distractedly thought it a pity when she saw him last - his hair had been thick and glossy and wavy, easily his best feature. Now it’s just long enough to curl at the ends, and he has to keep pushing it away from his face as he looks all around, craning his neck to see the Panopticon and the horizon and the water below.

“You have a question,” Jon says, and Basira startles, even though she was looking at him. She’s been alone for - well, time means nothing, but for a very long time. She isn’t used to being observed as she’s observing. 

“I told you not to look in my head,” she warns, but he’s already shaking his head and putting his hands up in defense.

“I didn’t, I swear. You’re doing your thinking face.”

Basira doesn’t bother protesting that she doesn’t have a thinking face. “What happens to the children?” she asks.

“Your nieces?” Jon says, his whole face melting into sympathy. 

“Yeah.”

“Most children go into the Dark domain, until they’re old enough that the others of the Dread Powers can cultivate their fears. But Rashida is probably old enough to be somewhere else. Do you want me to look?”

Basira doesn’t bother to ask how Jon knows her eldest niece’s name. “Can you, without taking a statement?” 

“I’ll try to look, and stop if a statement starts to come,” he promises, so she nods. She hears the faint static sound always around Jon these days pick up, as his hair stands on end and dozens of eyes open across his face and hands. Basira keeps her face still so she doesn’t betray how much this still disturbs her: it would be one thing if they were all Jon’s ordinary brown eyes, but some are blue and green and others not even human. On the palm of his hand like a hamsa, a tiger’s eye blinks at her, slit-pupiled and predatory.

“The younger two are in the Dark,” he says, his voice deep. “Leela is in a school somewhere after all the other kids go home, and Priya is in something similar to her house when it's past her bedtime. Rashida is on the the border of adulthood, so she’s on a Domain on the border, too. Rashida is alone in the street at night, trying to get home, and there is a man following her. She can’t turn and look: that would be rude, and she’s afraid if he knew she can see him, he’d start properly chasing her. But she can look at shadows in the streetlamps, and —“

Basira exclaims in surprise as Jon bites down savagely on his tongue. He lets out a cry of pain, sending blood dripping out his mouth and down his chin, then puts his head between his knees and shakes, fighting the pain and the compulsion. 

At last he raises his head again. “Sorry,” he says, garbled through his damaged tongue.

“Thank you,” Basira says. “You bit your tongue half-off.”

He huffs out a laugh, and sticks it out so he can watch, cross-eyed, as the skin heals over. Basira stares as well, fascinated despite herself. “You must miss your family,” he says when it’s done. 

“I didn’t want them getting mixed up in this with me,” Basira says. “Although if there’s one person who I think could stare down Jonah Magnus, it’s my mother.”

“Still,” he says, and nothing else. Basira rows for a few minutes in silence. She sees, in the distance, the spine of the creature in the water come onto the surface of the lake. Jon turns to watch as well, and she counts. This time, she gets to a hundred and six: more evidence for there being multiple creatures in the lake, which is even more frightening a concept.

“You must miss your own grandmother,” Basira says, faltering when she sees Jon’s face, suddenly uncertain, in that way people from loving homes are about the complexities of homes that aren’t. 

“Neither of us particularly wanted to be living together, and we tended to take it out on each other,” he says frankly. “I’m old enough now to realize it was her fault as well as mine. But when I had a bad day - and I was a mess of a child with a lot of bad days - she’d make me _tahdig_. I’ve been to half the Persian restaurants in London and no one makes it quite the same. It's such a simple recipe, so I might even be imagining the difference. Or maybe she did something special. Either way: I never once had a pleasant conversation with her in the two and a half decades I knew her, but I’d give a lot up to sit at our kitchen table and eat her _tahdig_ one more time.”

Jon blinks his two ordinary eyes and looks like he wasn’t expecting to tell her all that. Basira can see the shore of the lake now, far in the distance.

“I buried her,” Basira confesses. “I buried Daisy, put her in the dirt, but I didn’t know what to say over her body. I don’t remember the right prayers.”

“I’ve had a fair amount of experience with them,” Jon says, the side of his mouth twisting up. “When this is over, I’ll go with you.”

“When this is over,” Basira says.

“Fair point - I should probably just teach you them now.”

“You don’t think you’ll live through this?” 

Jon pushes his hair back from his forehead. “I don’t want to die,” he says finally. “If I did, our lives would probably be easier. But there is no version of this story where Daisy dies and I don’t.”

“I’ll watch out for Martin,” Basira offers, not knowing what else to say.

“No,” Jon says. “He’s more than capable of taking care of himself, and you’re at your worst when you take the world on your shoulders. He doesn’t need watching out for. Just… don’t let him be lonely, if this is ever all over. Don’t try to forget and move on, because you might have a family to go back to, and Melanie and Georgie have a family in each other now, but he doesn’t have anyone but me.”

“Alright,” Basira says, feeling faintly embarrassed at Jon’s assessment of her. _At your worst when you take the world on your shoulders._ He isn’t wrong.

“First, though, we get him back,” Jon says, as the boat finally approaches the shore. The Beholding isn’t in his voice, but a determination Basira has never heard is.

After they’ve jumped off the cliff but before they’re back in London, Jon turns to her. “I was going to teach you,” he says. “For Daisy, after.”

“Teach what?” Martin says, but Basira’s already shaking her head. 

“Sounds like you can teach me when we fix this,” she says. 

Burn down those fucking Archives. Kill Elias for all he’s done. Save her world by dooming another. See her family again. Visit Daisy’s grave.

Basira has a plan, a steel-trap mind, a skinny Persian Antichrist, and Martin to deflate their egos when they need it. For the first time in a long time, it feels like they have a chance.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Mahtem Shiferraw's "We, Made of Bone."
> 
> I'm not Muslim, so if I got anything wrong let me know!


End file.
